Fully Alive, Timothy Shriver
Fully Alive, Timothy Shriver
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Fully Alive
Discovering What Matters Most

Author: Timothy Shriver

Narrator: David Drummond

Unabridged: 10 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/20/2015


Synopsis

At a time when we are all more rudderless than ever, we look for the very best teachers and mentors to guide us. In Fully Alive, an unusual and gripping memoir, Timothy Shriver shows how his teachers have been the world's most forgotten minority: people with intellectual disabilities.

Shriver's journey begins close to home, where the quiet legacy of his aunt Rosemary, a Kennedy whose intellectual disability kept her far from the limelight, inspired his family to devote their careers to helping the most vulnerable. He plays alongside the children of Camp Shriver, his mother's revolutionary project, which provided a space for children with intellectual disabilities to play. Years later, he gains invaluable wisdom from the incredible athletes he befriends as chairman of the organization that Camp Shriver inspired: Special Olympics.

Fully Alive is both a moving personal journey and a meditation on some of the greatest wisdom and the greatest contradictions of our society. Is disability to be feared or welcomed, pitied or purged? Shriver argues that we all have different abilities and challenges we should embrace. We see how those who appear powerless have turned this seeming shortcoming into a power of their own, and we learn that we are all totally vulnerable and valuable at the same time.

About Timothy Shriver

Timothy Shriver is an educator, a social activist, a film producer, and an entrepreneur. He has led Special Olympics, an organization that serves upward of four million athletes in 170 countries, for more than a decade. Shriver is perhaps best known for cofounding-and currently chairing-the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), the leading research organization in the United States in the field of social and emotional learning. Timothy lives in Maryland with his wife and five children.


Reviews

Goodreads review by J.E. on September 30, 2019

I was a hard audience for this book. As a lifelong blind person who has met with more than my share of both sappy sweetness and hostility, I was understandably skeptical. But I hadn't made it through the description of the 1995 Special Olympics at the Yale Bowl in the introduction before my skeptici......more

Goodreads review by Stacey on August 31, 2015

A very sensitive, spiritual and insightful book about having hope, believing in yourself and living fully alive. Shriver, the son of Eunice Kennedy and brother to Maria, has long worked with the Special Olympics organization and has been a long-time supporter of people living with intellectual and p......more

Goodreads review by Brian on July 15, 2024

A moving book. Shriver's message about all of the special needs and intellectually disabled people his family has been involved with or known through their Special Olympics and other interests is a message I wish all could hear. In particular how valuable and impacting they have been to Shriver's li......more

Goodreads review by Jane on July 11, 2016

My library's summer reading theme this year is Read for the Win, and I chose Fully Alive as a discussion book for two of my book clubs because it is connected to the theme. I'm not a big reader of nonfiction or memoirs, and this is not a book I would ever have picked up to read if not for book club.......more

Goodreads review by Tim on June 06, 2020

As a person with a severe disability (cerebral palsy from birth), I’m not too sure what I think about this book. Timothy Shriver wrote “Fully Alive” to bring more awareness for people with disabilities. He briefly touched the Intellectual disability (ID) and the Developmental disability (DD) communi......more